I am designing a game for a childrens event Friday and was advised to purchase the following from Sparkfun:
arduino mini 328
FTDI Basic Breakout
Piezo vibration sensor-small horizontal
1.0M resistor
super bright LED.
Up until the order I had never heard of Arduino. I have dinged around with it a bit and uploaded the blink program, as well as made one change that sent the output to a different pin. That’s the extent of my experience. I am also powering the board with a 9v battery.
I need assistance or direction in how to configure what I have , so it fires of the led with a strobe like effect when the piezo senses vibration, or impact. I did find a tutorial for something similiar with the uno board. However, I am new to projects like this and do not know what pins to make connections to, etc, as well as how to change the programming to get the desired affect.
Can we assume you’ll be assembling the parts on a solderless breadboard ? Can you provide links to the piezo and LED, so we can know exactly what you have ? You should also a resistor to go in series w/the LED, something around 66 to 160 ohms, to limit the current through the LED. IIRC the tutorial had the 1M resistor in parallel w/the piezo, both tied to ground and your choice of any analog input pin. The aforementioned resistor goes btw a digital pin and the + lead of the LED. The - lead of the LED is then tied to ground. You can use any digital pin but it’s smart to avoid 0, 1 and perhaps 2 and 3.
As far as programming … what kind of effects do you want ? What would they depend on ? Hardness of tap to HIT ? Duration of shaking ? Random choice of N number of effects ?
Thank you for your reply. When my post did not appear at first, I called Tech Support for a couple pointers. I figured out how to wire things up and program the arduino mini 328. I figured out just enough programming to combine the example knock and blink scripts. You can see my first project in action here: